Since its inception in 1955, collection building has been an integral part of the IFP’s research activities. The IFP’s collections and its research have always had a synergistic relationship. The collections are both the outcome of research and the basis of further research activities. This relationship has contributed to the longevity and dynamism of the collections and ongoing efforts to create new and even more diverse research collections and archives at the IFP.

Over the years, in keeping with emerging technological shifts, the demands of curation, storage and collection management, as well as the requirements of researchers, many of the IFP’s core collections, such as the indology manuscripts and herbarium among others, have been digitized. This platform consolidates and curates these collections in order to make them widely available to both researchers and the general public over the long term. Internally, it provides the IFP with a single, unified data management system for its collections and archives in an open-source software, Omeka S.

This portal also showcases the many digitized collections created by the IFP's researchers in the framework of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) of the British Library, supported by the Arcadia Foundation. Since 2008, the IFP has successfully carried out 6 major and 4 pilot EAP projects significantly enhancing and diversifying its collections.

Additionally, this portal provides access to 3 digital applications that were originally published as CD-ROMs in the Collection Indologie series of the IFP/EFEO.

Together these collections represent a corpus of hundreds of thousands of images, ranging from ecological specimens to manuscripts in Indian languages, from photos on temple art to resources on social history, from Tamil customary law to South Indian studio portraiture, vernacular mathematics, Siddha medicine and French colonial administration in India.

Due to the varying statuses of the collections, some forming the core of the IFP collections and others created by IFP researchers and partners with the support of various funding agencies, not all data is currently integrated into the Omeka-S platform. Collections not included in the database but linked to external sites are listed under “External Collections.” In the future, we envision many more collections  joining this portal, along with scientific data accumulated over decades of research by the IFP team. Efforts will continue  to make these resources identifiable and accessible.

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